Progressive Business Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:
Reliable - Load instantly and never show the dinosaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
Fast - Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
Engaging - Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.
This new level of quality allows Progressive Web Apps to earn a place on the user's home screen.
Reliable
When launched from the user’s home screen, service workers enable a Progressive Business Web App to load instantly, regardless of the network state.
A service worker, written in JavaScript, is like a client-side proxy and puts you in control of the cache and how to respond to resource requests. By pre-caching key resources you can eliminate the dependence on the network, ensuring an instant and reliable experience for your users.
Fast
53% of users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load! And once loaded, users expect them to be fast—no janky scrolling or slow-to-respond interfaces.
Engaging
Progressive Business Web Apps are installable and live on the user's home screen, without the need for an app store. They offer an immersive full screen experience with help from a web app manifest file and can even re-engage users with web push notifications.
The Web App Manifest allows you to control how your app appears and how it's launched. You can specify home screen icons, the page to load when the app is launched, screen orientation, and even whether or not to show the browser chrome.
Why do we need a Progressive Business Web App?
Before we understand why we need a Progressive Business Web App, let’s talk about some of the challenges we are facing today with native and web apps.
No load time
Progressive Business Web applications are available instantly.
Responsive
The primary concern of all app developers and designers is to offer responsive apps on all devices such as mobile, desktop, laptop, and tablet.
Progressive web apps are equally responsive on all the devices.
Progressive
As the name suggests, these web apps are progressive. These are built with progressive enhancement and can work on any browser.
App shell mode
You can build progressive web apps on app shell technology and hence they deliver an app like feel to the users.
User engagement
With specific features like push notifications, progressive web apps are highly user engageable.
Size and Auto update
As discussed the average size of mobile apps is 30 MB to 200 MB. However, the progressive apps are within some KBs. Besides, due to Service Workers, these apps are updated automatically.
Works offline
There are some situations when an app is needed urgently, but the user does not have an internet connection. This problem is resolved in progressive web apps. Again the Service Workers are a saviour! They act as a network proxy. Whenever a page is requested, Service Workers tries to access that content from the cache.